A Personal Blog
Archive for August, 2005
Barnyard: What the $%#?!!!
Aug 1st
Okay, if anyone doesn’t go “what the hell?!!!” at this trailer, I’ll be really impresed.
It’s funny… But is this too far into the “adult” in “kids/adult movie”? Nickelodeon making a movie where cows wander into kids bedrooms and push them over in the night? Smart move…
Why Do Only One Job?
Aug 1st
This is reposted from The Wealthy Blogger, because I thought it was the kind of thing people here might enjoy:
I’ve realized that I no longer have only one job. And you know what? I like it. Sure, it’s interesting having several “bosses” and clients in different industries expecting different things, but it’s also exhilirating. One day I might be writing, another I might be consulting, another I might be speaking and another I might just take half the day off to spend time with my family. Like today.
I’ve found that this mix of things to do keeps me sane, keeps me grounded and means that I never “hate my job”. After all, I’ve got 3-5 of them, so if one of them stinks I can always switch it out for something equally profitable that I enjoy more. It’s easier to replace a job when it’s only 20% of your income than it is when it’s 100%.
In an earlier post, I talked briefly about transitioning to your dream job.
My real secret is that my dream job isn’t just one job. Currently, I hold the following “positions” at “Jeremy Wright, Inc.”:
1. Blogger 2. Consultant 3. Author 4. Courseware developer 5. Speaker / Trainer 6. Writer
And I do these in areas such as time management, personal finance, blogging, communications, marketing and technology.
My day-to-day life is actually fairly diverse. Basically, early on, getting paid to work on my own involved doing all kinds of things I didn’t enjoy. In my first month of being self-employed, I was a:
1. Grunt journalist 2. Grunt writer 3. Grunt blogger
“Grunt” meant doing the things nobody else wanted to do.
Slowly I transitioned each of these individual positions to something I enjoyed more. I replaced the journalist with the consultant. I replaced the writer with becoming a book author. I replaced just being a blogger with becoming a speaker. And, eventually, I added some of the other bits around this.
Maybe you love writing, but you also enjoy crafts and you like helping people. So maybe your mix of jobs is writing freelance articles (some on crafts and helping people), starting a home business around crafts, and working with local government agencies to help people with various disabilities on a part-time basis (most areas have positions for people to just spend time with folk who need some normalcy in their lives… think of it as Big Brother for adults).
Or maybe you’re a software developer. So you write some of your own software, you write some articles, you start a blog and you do some contract work.
I honestly believe one of the reasons people “hate” their jobs is that they’re only doing one thing. And doing one thing gets old.
Having more than one “job” gives you freedom, flexibility and much more joy than trying to make one job work. It’s also a lot of presure if you’re trying to find your “one dream job”. Consider splitting it up. One advantage to doing so is that you can slowly ramp up to your dream job (and away from your hated one), as opposed to needing one position which meets all of your financial needs.
Addendum to A-List Post
Aug 1st
As an addendum to the earlier post (read it first for context), I’ve begun re-evaluating my reading habits. I’ve cut down from 350 blogs I’m reading to nearly 200.
I’ve begun asking myself what actual value each blog brings me.
I put “value” in 3 categories:
1. Professional value (finding out about items of professional interest) 2. Personal value (finding out about friends) 3. General value (comics, interesting tidbits, hobbies, etc)
This has meant that I’ve unsubscribed from some blogs I’ve read since I started blogging, some good friends’ blogs and some blogs that are industry leaders.
It’s actually tearing me up. But, I know it’s healthy. Spending 2-4 hours a day reading blogs is a Bad Thing(tm).
This post is part of a bunch of thoughts on finding balance in blogging, and ultimately on breaking the blogging addiction.
Unsubscribing from the A-List
Aug 1st
I’ve just unsubscribed from every A-List blogger I read.
This includes Scoble specifically. See, this post was going to just be about Scoble, but I realized the reasons I was unsubscribing from his blog are valid across the blogosphere.
I consider Scoble a friend. Not a closer personal friend, but the kind I enjoy grabbing lunch with when I’m in Redmond, and the kind it’s fun to chat with whenever we both have time. It’s not like I make time in my week (or month) to talk to him, but he’s one of the reasons I started blogging…
… Which is one of the reasons this is hard.
You see, over the last 6 months, I can count on one hand the number of posts on Scoble’s blog that I actually enjoyed, truly read or got any real value from.
This isn’t his fault, really. His style was almost always “link to the best stuff, talk about the worst”. But the problem is that now that I’m connected, I get most of this info first. It’s kind of like Slashdot. In the good old days (ahem), it was one of the best sources for geek news. You put up with the roudy comments because it was always timely.
But now I get news faster than Slashdot, so I barely read it. It’s similar with Scoble.
The value in Scoble’s blog was always:
1. It’s Scoble 2. He was always brutally honest 3. He was humble
The problem, for me as a reader, is that this equation has changed. There ain’t much Scoble in there anymore. And while he’s still honest (ie: he’s not lying), his honesty now often comes across as defending Microsoft. Not always, by any stretch, but it does happen quite a bit. When he feels something’s off, he’ll still happily say so, though, so it’s not like he’s a shill. But, he has been affected by working at Microsoft.
Which is fair enough. Anyone who spends more than an hour there gets affected by it.
My real problem with Robert, and the A-List overall, is the #3 area. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say anyone isn’t humble. That’d be arrogance. But, Robert’s humility has definitely taken a different form lately. He’ll still apologize when he’s wrong. But, it’s changed.
I won’t go into why it’s changed, nor will I say Robert’s a bad blogger or a bad person. He’s a great person. Anyone who’s met him in person knows that the guy who appears on the front of scoble.weblogs.com is not the same guy you sit across the table from at Crossroads and talk about cool geeky stuff with. In person, Robert’s still mostly the same old guy.
So, I can’t really fault him.
But as a reader, I’m not finding value anymore in his posts or in most of the A-List’s bloggers I read’s posts. I love Doc’s blog. But beyond that, it’s kind of like Slashdot: the posts that are really valuable will get linked to by someone else.
It’s like the reverse A-List. A-Listers always say “if you want me to blog about your post, get others to blog about it”. Well, now I’m saying it back.
Again, I’m not unsubscribing as a friend. Robert’s a fantastic guy. I’m just unsubscribing as a blogger.
Maybe I’ll be back. Or maybe I’ll just read once in a while while eating breakfast (like I do Dave Winer’s blog, having never subscribed to it).
Either way, I’m done.
Maybe you, too, should re-evaluate your blog reading habits. If you don’t actually find value here, feel free to unsubscribe. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. Feel free to subscribe if you want to, or if you feel like there’s still enough “Jeremy” here. But if there isn’t, or you’re only reading because you’ve always read or because it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time, feel free to re-think that choice.
Blogging’s about relationships, about value, about authenticity and about authority.
If we can’t be honest and only read the blogs where we find value (personal value, professional value or informational value), there’s a real problem.
I’ve got a post half-written which talks about this in some more depth, but the gist of this long post is simple: I, as a reader (not as a friend), am no longer finding value in Scoble or the A-List.
